


i'd risk everything but my heart (don't fall in love with me)

by kwritten



Category: Revolution (TV), The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Aromantic, Canon Disabled Character, F/F, Female Character of Color, Female Protagonist, Female-Centric, Found Family, Marijuana, Queerplatonic Relationships, Recreational Drug Use, background bell/wells, background monty/miller, implied finn/raven history, the gang's all here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 10:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5781610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>PROMPT::  The 100/Revolution: more, more, more of your lovely aromantic Raven and Charlie. "No matter how hard they party, no matter who lies between them, Raven-and-Charlie is their constant; friends, lovers, co-conspirators."</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'd risk everything but my heart (don't fall in love with me)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JaqofSpades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/gifts).



“It’s kinda creepy you always study here.”

Raven peered over the book perched on her knees and raised one eyebrow delicately, but didn’t deign to respond. Charlie paced in circles on the raised platform that had once been an ornate water fountain but now was just a dry, crumbling collection of stone and cement. She held a joint loosely between her long fingers, her own pile of books discarded near Raven’s feet. 

“I know, I know,” Charlie blew a puff of smoke out and crouched down near Raven’s head. “I don’t have to come here.” She frowned and refused to give up the pot when Raven reached her hand up for it, standing up to pace again, “It’s not my fault you are the only reasonably well-adjusted human I know.”

Raven snorted and didn’t even try to cover it up with a cough when Charlie shot her a scowl the way she would have with anyone else. She grabbed Charlie’s rolled up cardigan from the ground and shoved it under her head with her own and sighed contentedly. 

“I guess well-adjusted is a relative term considering our friends,” Charlie flopped down on the bench at Raven’s feet and slung her arm over her raised knees, leaning her cheek against Raven’s shins. “Why do we even have the friends we have?”

“Why are we friends?” Raven smirked, highlighting a passage of the text, grazing Charlie’s arm mostly-intentionally and leaving a neon pink slash on her lightly tanned skin. 

“Who says we are?” Charlie sighed and took another long draw from her joint, passing it from her right hand to her left to pass it to Raven, who took it gingerly between her thumb and forefinger and considered it for a long moment before bringing it to her lips. 

“I can never keep track of who our enemies are,” she blew out little bits of smoke with each syllable, smiling to herself. “If we’re at war with each other, I’m going to need something written down.”

“Some groundrules,” Charlie grabbed the joint out of Raven’s hand before she could take a second hit and leaned her head back against the edge of the bench, sliding down slightly, her legs spread out wide in front of her. 

Raven highlighted a section in yellow and added a note on a post-it that she slapped to the margin of the page, “Guidelines of conduct.”

Charlie smiled, “You’d lose.”

Raven let her hand dangle to the ground, sightlessly grasping for the large metal canister of water she always made sure to have near her. Charlie watched the gesture for a moment, before leaning forward and swiping the bottle off the ground, the metal grazing Raven’s fingertips. She sighed as she watched Charlie take a long swig. “I think you’re what the kids these days call a _frenemy_.”

“Because I seduced your roommate?”

Raven sat up, leaning her chest against her legs, and grabbed the water from Charlie’s loose grip. “Poor Jason,” she lay back down, rearranging the pile of sweaters and her backpack under her head. 

“It wasn’t the _least_ kind thing I’ve ever done,” Charlie said pointedly, tossing aside the fragmented remains of the joint with a sigh of regret. “I always smoke those too fast.”

“Monty will give you more…” Raven hesitated.

Charlie raised her eyebrows at her, “If?”

“If you stop throwing yourself at Nate,” Raven replied primly, forcing her gaze back to her book and obviously fighting back the smile when Charlie started giggling. 

“Okay I’ll stop.”

“Why?”

“Because you asked,” Charlie lifted her legs straight out in front of her, kicking a little. 

“No. Why would I lose?”

“Why do we come here?” Charlie slammed her feet back on the ground and draped her arm back around Raven’s legs. 

“You follow me. It’s called stalking in most States,” Raven started sketching a flower on the arm now intruding over half of her textbook. 

“I told you. You’re the only human I can tolerate for more than a few minutes.” Charlie twitched her arm a bit, “That tickles.”

“Serves you right.”

“Come on, hot stuff,” Charlie’s voice took on that sing-song quality Raven had seen turn countless innocents into drooling fools. “You know I love this story.”

“It’s not even a story,” Raven bit her lower lip as she started shading, expanding the bloom of the lily now stretching across a large portion of Charlie’s forearm. 

Charlie’s fingers lazily slid up and down Raven’s calf, “Tell it anyway and then I promise I’ll let you pull out those flashcards you made.”

“I stole them from Clarke’s room.”

Charlie gasped in feigned shock, “You naughty minx.” There was a slight edge of admiration in Charlie’s voice and it made Raven smile. 

“In high school, my boyfriend brought me here. We used to come all the time as kids with his parents, back when it was operational,” Raven paused in her drawing and let her eyes scan over their silent backdrop. “I had practically forgotten about it, but he found out that it was just… here. Not moved or changed. The same.”

Charlie shifted, “So you come here to relive the night your high school sweetheart popped your cherry?”

Raven grinned broadly, cheekily, “Right on this bench.”

“You’re joking,” Charlie rolled her eyes. “You lost it in the back of his mother’s station wagon, you’ve told me a thousand times.”

“I told you once,” Raven replied placidly. “And I could have been lying.”

“I’d do it on that,” Charlie pointed up at the Ferris wheel. 

It looked like the leftover from a movie set about a zombie apocalypse. Someone had climbed up to the top carriages years ago and tagged them, the words no longer distinguishable after years of wear. If she liked Clarke more, Raven would bring her and her camera and sketchbooks here, but that felt wrong somehow. As if trying to capture it all would taint it. 

Charlie whistled under her breath, “I’d climb all the way up to the top and say something romantic or poetic about the stars and then fuck them up there.”

“I’ll wear red to your funeral,” Raven said brightly. “I’ll even pretend to shed a tear.”

“If I was sixteen and in love and very, very stupid and had a penis that totally conflicted with my ability to function, I’d have taken your virginity up there and not in the back of my mom’s station wagon,” Charlie hissed, her eyes flashing. “You are wasted on other people, Reyes.”

“I thought we were at war, Matheson,” Raven pursed her lips at the calla lily on Charlie’s arm. 

“You’d lose.”

“I did once,” Raven mused. 

“Lost?”

“I’ve never lost,” she’d never willingly gone to war with anyone before, but she liked to think that she was strong enough to beat anything and any odds. Especially those against her. 

“You fucked a boy on that Ferris wheel!” Charlie leaned against Raven’s legs and smiled wickedly down at her. “You waited all this time to tell me?!”

“I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“Your ass is always relevant, idiot,” Charlie turned her face back to the Ferris wheel. “How high up did you climb?”

“Only to the second one. I pretended to be afraid,” Raven frowned at the brace hidden beneath her jeans. 

She had barely made it out to this bench after the accident, had had to skirt the edges of the grounds for nearly a year, studying and reading under the gaze of the frozen horses on the carousel, the clown above the twisted mirror display, the witches flying over the haunted house. Charlie was right, in her own reckless and dangerous way, she _should_ have dragged Finn’s trembling legs up to the top of the Ferris wheel and kissed him swinging under the stars, when she could. 

“Did he fall in love with you?” Charlie kept her gaze fixed on the scene in front of them, five years gone but still lingering in the air between them. 

Raven laughed, “About thirty seconds after I told him very explicitly not to.”

She had seen it in the split second before it happened, she’d kissed him and pulled back only to find his heart in her hands, begging her and pleading, responsibility falling heavy on her shoulders. 

“Never tell anyone that part,” Charlie frowned. “Especially O and Mia,” she amended, “I walked in on them cuddling and watching _The Notebook_ the other day. I’ve never seen two people cry that much before in my life.”

Raven wrinkled her nose, “They tried to convince me that _Die Hard_ was a romcom last week.” 

“ _Die Hard_ is a Christmas movie,” they said in unison and then broke into laughter. 

“Marry me, darling,” Charlie batted her eyes. 

“Call me goddess,” Raven teased.

“Marry me, goddess divine.”

“Ask me again when we’re thirty-five and I’ll consider it.”

“If O hasn’t married us both off by then,” Charlie replied wryly. There wasn’t much Octavia couldn’t accomplish if she put her mind to it. 

Raven loved Octavia and Mia, as much as she may gripe about them in public and private – they were whirlwinds, little bundles of roses and emotions and laughter. She couldn’t imagine her life without them on her couch, in her room, in her kitchen. She’d been roped into Octavia’s life by her older brother, Bellamy. He’d been Raven’s TA in an Ancient Philosophy class that she’d been determined to just phone in, but Bellamy had adopted her the way she’d seen Wells bring home hissing alley cats when they were kids, no matter how much she pushed him away, he’d only laughed in her face. Within a few weeks, it was almost like she was a Blake and not a Reyes, and she’d opted to just stop fighting it since her sarcasm and outright hostility had only made the Blake siblings love her more. When she’d complained to Wells about it, he’d just laughed and said something about how adorable she was and she’d thrown a pillow at his head. She’d passed that damn class, breaking the damn curve with her final paper. Bellamy had preened about it as if it had been entirely up to him and had had nothing to do with her at all. 

With the Blakes came Mia and Nora and Monty and a constant stream of people, and Charlie. 

When Raven decided to move out of the dorms after her first year, it seemed only natural to move into the house Bellamy shared with Jason, Lincoln, and Nate. And by _natural_ , what Raven really meant was that she showed up with all her shit one day without warning and didn’t take no for an answer. They had a spare room and so she claimed it. Bellamy had just smiled like he’d planned it that way all along and the other three guys were slightly afraid of her, so no one really put up a fight.

The house was always crawling with people, which she mostly didn’t hate. Wells practically lived there now, half of his shit was in Bellamy’s room, and Monty didn’t appear to live anywhere at all. Nearly half the time Octavia and Mia camped out in their dining room, sometimes dragging Connor and Clarke along with them, and it wasn’t long before Charlie was spending equal time in Raven’s room as she did in her own in Octavia’s apartment across town. They were a natural fit, Charlie’s bright smile and Raven’s sharp wit. Even Wells, who had known Raven her whole life, admitted that it felt like they’d always been a matching set. 

They were something and nothing, dressed in each other’s clothes and laughing at the same awful jokes that no one else understood. 

Raven kicked Charlie slightly. “Tell me why you’d think I’d lose.”

Charlie lifted Raven’s legs and slid under them, resting Raven’s feet on the bench again, laying her arm across Raven’s stomach, gripping her ankle with her other hand, her thumb rubbing the bare skin above Raven’s sock gently. “Because I’d win.”

Raven laughed, “Because you always win?”

“I’ve never lost,” Charlie shrugged. 

They were silent for a long while, the sun slowly slipping behind the skyline, the shadows around them deepening. It was a bit like being in the middle of a demented ghost town, all the carnival rides and booths empty shells, once full of shining laughing people, now forgotten on the edge of the city, only housing two girls and a thousand unspoken things. 

“I’d never bet against you,” Charlie finally broke the silence, laughing a little under her breath as she spoke.

“Against anyone but you, anyway.”

“What are we playing for?” Charlie’s fingers toyed with the edge of Raven’s thin t-shirt. She said it softly, almost as if she was unsure, which made something in Raven’s stomach lurch. 

They were always sure, they were always on the same page. When Charlie crawled into her bed for the first time and they just lay there, limbs tangled up together. When Raven kissed Harper and let her pull Charlie’s shirt over her head. When Charlie instinctively made two cups of coffee in the morning. When Raven went to the girls’ apartment after a hard day instead of retreating to her room with a bad movie. When everyone knew to ask one when they were looking for the other. When they kissed and it didn’t feel like they were giving anything away or holding anything that didn’t always belong to them anyway. 

Because they’d never had to warn each other, _don’t fall in love with me_ , because those weren’t the stakes. 

Raven raised her hands to her knees and pulled herself up, smacking her head against Charlie’s with a _crack_.

“So violent,” Charlie muttered as she angled her head to press her lips against Raven’s. The kiss was like every kiss between them, soft and sweet and hard and needy and forgetful and wanting and giving. Everything that every other kiss could never be. Raven leaned closer, snaked her fingers through Charlie’s long hair and pulled a little too hard. She liked being hard with Charlie, because when she wanted it, Charlie was hard right back. Charlie bit down a little on Raven’s bottom lip and smiled. They were like two wolves, grinning as they licked their chops, nestled up to each other, rolled around in the other’s scent and carried the feeling of their skin on each other’s bodies. Raven liked them this way, she lowered her knees and Charlie took that as a signal to pull her fully on her lap. Raven’s bad leg stretched out on the bench and the other curled in, making room for her hips to turn slightly. Tonight, they didn’t pant or stretch or scratch or whisper. 

They were something and they were nothing and they kissed under the stars because they wanted to and because they wouldn’t lose anything if they did. They were nothing and they were something and they kissed in a carnival of ghosts and memory because they wouldn’t carry shadows on their shoulders if they did. 

Raven pulled away slightly and looked up at the sky, “It’s getting late.”

They gathered up their things, shoving books and papers into whatever bag or hand was handy. There was no separation of church and state between them, all things just _were_ and would end up in the right place when the time came to it. 

“Just so you know, I’m playing for some of Mia’s peanut-butter-chunk brownies,” Raven whispered once they were on the bus headed home. 

Charlie appraised her with wide eyes and then smiled in a disturbingly feline way, “You’re on.”

 

(Later that week, Mia was found in Bellamy’s kitchen making her famous brownies because Raven was feeling down after a bad break up and she was just so sensitive, it really was up to Mia to boost the poor girl’s spirits. No one in the house corrected her because any reason Mia found to make her brownies was accepted regardless of its authenticity. Two hours later, Octavia bought over a dozen of her experimental cupcakes, because Raven always craved sugar before a big exam. If either girl realized later that night that they had been played, no one heard about it. On the other hand, Charlie very happily crowned Raven with a makeshift tiara and she was named King of the House by all her roommates and they all ate very well that night.)

(Charlie demanded higher stakes for their next war and Raven just smiled.)

 

It’s easy to wage a war when you have nothing to lose and nothing to gain.


End file.
